Scottish Developers are please to present two talks by Mark Rendle on Monday 10th October 2011 in Glasgow.

Mark is currently employed as Principal Software Architect by Dot Net Solutions Ltd, creating all manner of software on the Microsoft stack, including ASP.NET MVC, Windows Azure, WPF and Silverlight. He is a Windows Azure Development MVP.

Mark’s career in software design and development spans three decades and more programming languages than he can remember. C# has been his favourite language pretty much since the first public beta, when you had to write the code in a text editor and compile it on the command line. Those were the days. You kids today, with your IntelliSense and your ReSharpers, don’t know you’re born…

Things vying for Mark’s attention lately include functional programming, internet-centric applications, the Azure cloud platform and NoSQL data stores.

Zen and the Art of Software

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a book about Quality; what it is, where it exists, and how we may try to attain it. In this talk, I will use passages from the book to introduce ideas on how we, as software developers, might try to improve the Quality both of the software we create and of ourselves. I’ll talk about what “Quality” means in the context of software, how to measure it, and the importance of close interaction with users at all stages of software development.

How to Manage Your Manager

Developers and managers generally don’t understand each other. Developers know the arcane languages of machines and are motivated by inexplicable forces. Managers seem to spend half their time in meetings and the other half emailing each other Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. The result is that both sides end up frustrated, feeling that the other is stopping them from doing their job to the best of their ability.

In this talk, I will share some of the things I’ve learned in 20 years of being managed, including:

• How to get the PC you want, with the two big monitors and a decent CPU.
• Also, how to get extra software, training, and even sent to conferences.
• How to adopt best practices, like TDD, pairing and daily stand-ups even though your manager doesn't know what they are, and probably doesn’t care.
• How to earn the respect of people who seem to actively like wearing suits.
• Maybe, possibly, how to respect them just a little bit.

Agenda - Monday, 10th October, 2011

• 19:00 - 19:05: Introduction
• 19:05 - 19:55: Zen and the Art of Software
• 19:55 - 20:05: Break
• 20:05 - 21:00: How to Manage Your Manager
• 21:00 onwards: Retire to the bar

Location

The event will be held at the Bath Street Pony, 207 Bath Street, Glasgow, G2 4HZ. The event starts at 19:00 but feel free to arrive early and have a few drinks in the bar. The bar also serves food if you want to eat before the event.